Why not reconfigure the problem as a computer "what if" analytics question and let the computer scientists solve it?

InfoWorld|Sep 26, 2008

With both politicians and economists waffling on what the right thing to do is to get out of the mess they got us into, why not reconfigure the problem as a computer "what if" analytics question and let the computer scientists solve it.

To paraphrase the great song writer Leonard Cohen, I hope they're "keeping some kind of record."

What I'm talking about is the current financial crisis and all the data points they could be collecting so that computer scientists -- using economists only to tell them what data should be put into the stew -- can create financial models for forecasting the next disaster.

In fact, I'm thinking that there must be enough historical data available now that shows us what happens when markets go boom or bust to create "what if" models that might be used in the current situation.

Certainly Obama and McCain know nothing. Their advisers appear to know as little. Everyone says there is no way of knowing what the outcome of any solution will be. That has to be wrong.

It is obvious that economics is barely a science. It appears to be just seat of the pants guess work.

If Warren Buffet, founder of Berkshire Hathaway, says to do one thing and Secretary Henry Paulson former head of Goldman Sachs and Fed Reserve Chief Ben Bernancke, former professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, say to do another, there must be so much gray, unstructured, unscientific aspects to economics that no one seems able to come up with a single answer.

But if you talk to real computer scientists like the author of "The Age of Intelligent Machines," Ray Kurzweil, he'll tell you that there is nothing that can't be made into structured data so that a computer can figure out a proper answer.

In sports the excitement of a game comes from not knowing the outcome because there are so many variables on any given day.

But when it comes to the economic well-being of the country and the world, I would rather the economists and politicians who are struggling to find an answer turn this over to the really smart people in computer science. At least there is a scientific discipline to back up its findings.